Selective call messaging, such as paging messaging, involves transmitting a message or a page to an intended selective call receiver by radio frequency (RF) signals. The page is received from an originator at a selective call terminal and is encoded into a format recognizable by the selective call receiver. A selective call address assigned to the receiver is added to the message to indicate the intended selective call receiver. The message is then transmitted for reception within a selective call system coverage area in which the receiver is expected to be located.
Conventionally, pages are received by the selective call terminal from remote devices via telephones, in the case of voice and numeric messages, or data handlers, in the case of alphanumeric messages. In addition, some pages are originated from information supplied to video display terminals (VDTs) coupled directly to the selective call terminal. The formats of the signals received from the telephones, data handlers, and VDTs are known to the selective call terminal and are compatible with the formatting of the selective call signals into known signalling formats.
Pages sent from the data handler to the selective call terminal may originate from information service providers as well. Information service providers may provide database messages including financial data, news, sports or other generally distributed information. Each selective call receiver which is to receive database messages from an information service provider must recognize which database messages are authorized for reception by the selective call receiver. Initially, when the selective call receiver receives an RF signal, it must discriminate between personal messages and database messages sent by information service providers. Once this is accomplished, the selective call receiver determines whether or not the database message is one that the selective call receiver is authorized to receive. The personal messages and the authorized database messages are subsequently stored in memory.
Both database messages sent by information service providers and personal messages may be viewed by the user on a display device, such as a liquid crystal display (LCD), incorporated by the selective call receiver. Displaying a database on the LCD may become unwieldy, however, due to the typically long length of database information and the small size of the LCD. In such cases, conventional selective call receivers may be conveniently coupled to an external electronic device, such as a personal computer, having a larger display. The database may then be transmitted from the selective call receiver to the computer for subsequent viewing by the user.
Information service providers may provide large quantities of data in each database message, resulting in large internally stored databases within the selective call receiver. Transmitting the data to a computer can be time consuming, and, if several databases are transmitted at approximately the same time, the user may have to wait to read the database. The volume of data can be, and in most cases is, greater than a typical user can easily consume, even if the database is transmitted to an external electronic device for display on a large display device. For example, when a message updating a database is received by a selective call receiver, the user must often scroll through the entire database, whether it is displayed by the LCD or by an external electronic device, to read the updated portion. In this manner, the user may waste time by scrolling through an entire database before discovering that the changes made in the database are of no interest to him.
To aid the user in interpreting the data, some limited data processing features have been developed and incorporated in selective call receivers, although the features are severely limited by constraints on the space available for software within the selective call receiver. One such feature allows the user to scroll through the data and select a specific page of data within a database in which he is particularly interested. Thereafter, the selective call receiver will automatically present the selected page of data whenever the selected page is updated by a database message. Due to power consumption restrictions and software space constraints within the selective call receiver, however, the use of processing features can be so limited as to be of minimal assistance to the user.
Thus, what is needed is a method and apparatus for generating identifying information about messages and notifying an external processor having additional processing resources of the identifying information without overloading the interface therebetween with message transference.